


Fault Lines

by Lissadiane



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-20
Updated: 2015-10-20
Packaged: 2018-04-27 05:05:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5034907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lissadiane/pseuds/Lissadiane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes the most painful part of falling to pieces is taking someone down with you.</p>
<p>April and Sam are building a life together around her mental illness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fault Lines

**Author's Note:**

> Warning for themes of depression, body image issues and self harm.

The sadness struck on a Saturday, which made things tough, because on Saturdays, she had things to do that required a little more thought and a lot less autopilot.

“My face looks strange,” she said, and Sam didn’t look up from where he was digging through his sock drawer, trying to find the proper shade of green to match the sock he held in his left hand.

“Your face is fine,” he said.

She touched her cheek and wondered if it felt like parchment paper or if that was just her fingertips. She wondered if it was age, if this was aging, if she had stepped over that line between being a young adult and being just a plain, old adult. She wondered if wrinkles appeared in the morning, if they were just there when you woke one morning, or if it was more gradual, if you saw them coming at all. She touched her laugh lines and wondered if they were laugh lines and if she’d laughed enough in her 34 years to earn laugh lines at all. She wondered if sadness left lines.

She thought for a moment, fancifully, of someone else borrowing her face while she was sleeping and wearing it out, laughing and smiling enough to leave the lines, and then returning her face before morning.

She smiled a little but didn’t feel it.

“I can’t find my green sock,” Sam said, exasperated. He’d run his hand through his hair half a dozen times since putting on his pants, and it was standing up in shower-damp spikes, showing a faintly receding hairline. She wondered if he wondered if someone borrowed his hair and returned it slightly damaged by morning.

“It’s in the laundry basket,” she told him. “The clean one, by the couch.”

He left the room to resume his search and she turned back to her face.

Saturdays were always the worst, when the sadness struck, but at least for now, she still remembered how to breathe.

She took a deep breath to prove it and then started brushing away the damage with her fingertips and concealer.

*

“I don’t want to go,” she decided. It was forty minutes later and she was dressed -- a skirt and a shirt and a cardigan, but the colours made her feel flushed and unattractive, the cut of the skirt drew attention to her hips and her stomach, all the places she wanted to hide.

There were only two steps to the front door and Sam was waiting on the other side, impatient. The car was running and it was raining.

“We have to go,” Sam told her, reaching for her hand. “You’re already ready.”

“I look stupid,” she said. She was feeling dull. She wanted to go back to bed, to hide under a blanket and close her eyes until breathing was easier. Until smiling felt real.

“You do this every time,” he snapped. “Just get in the car. I told you, you look fine.”

“I don’t do this every time,” she argued, as he tugged her out of the house. “I never do this on Saturdays, if I can help it.”

“April,” he said, but he wasn’t looking at her when he said it. “We really need to go. We’re late.”

They were always late.

*

The day was a long one, and by the end of it, April’s joints felt like gears that were running out of oil. She’d survived on going through the motions but the motions were coming harder now.

“I’ll have a bath,” she told Sam, who was unlocking the door. She followed him inside.

“Good idea,” he said, turning on the TV. “Are you hungry? I was going to make something.”

“No,” she said, because eating made the sadness worse. “Not really.”

She drifted upstairs, feeling heavy, and turned on the bath, adding a bit of oil and then lighting the scented candles she kept on the window ledge. There were seven of them, a mixture of scents from cotton candy to sandalwood.

While the bath was running, she went to her room across the hall, grabbed her worn out robe and the book she was reading. A shirtless man smoldered from the front cover, a woman’s arm wrapped around his waist and her hair spilling down over his shoulder. April couldn’t remember what the book was about but they were all the same, in the end.

She closed the bathroom door and hung her robe up on the hook behind it. She turned off the water when the tub was full, and then turned off the lights, so the flickering candles were the only illumination.

Her hair caught in her cardigan when she pulled it off, and then tangled in her shirt as well. Her skirt caught on her hips and she wiggled a little to send it to the floor. Her underwear soon followed, and then her bra.

The water was too hot and she wanted it that way. It burned and her breath hissed out between her lips, the first thing she’d felt since early that morning. As her skin turned pink and sank beneath the surface, breathing became a little easier.

Leaning back, April let the water lap at her breasts and her shoulders, licking up along her neck and sucking at her hair. She closed her eyes and sank lower, until her knees poked up and the water was level with her closed lips, a line of heat along her face. She felt it move with every breath, and it was just more proof to her that she was still breathing.

She felt like a broken down machine, but she was still breathing.

It was enough, for now.

*

Sam was tired.

He was tired but he was hungry too, and wasn’t that a struggle.

He was on the couch, with his feet up, the remote control in one hand and the guide screen listing his options in front of him, but he was staring at the kitchen and wondering if maybe he ought to actually get up off his lazy ass and make something.

Maybe they had some chips. Or crackers. Or hell, maybe he wasn’t really that hungry after all.

He heard the bath water start upstairs and rolled his shoulders, pushing away some of the tension.

He was tired. And he had to pee. He should have gone before April got in the bath. He should have insisted on a house with two bathrooms. It seemed silly, though, to spend money on so much room when they didn’t really need it.

The bathwater turned off and the tv still waited for him to make a selection, ‘mute’ flashing in the corner in green letters. Everything was silent.

Maybe they should get a dog, he thought, letting his head fall back against the back of the couch. A big one, whose nails would scratch up the hardwood as it walked across the floor, and damage the furniture. The couch could use a mark or two, to prove someone lived here.

He thought about getting up early in the mornings in winter to walk the dog, and frowned a little, not sure it was worth the sacrifice. 

Upstairs, there was only silence. He wondered if he could hear the water if he tried, and he closed his eyes to listen. Only silence.

Sam sighed.

He was tired. More tired than hungry. More tired than anything.

He turned the tv off and shut off the lights as he walked through the first floor, checking the locks on the doors. Then he went upstairs, knocking once on the bathroom door before he opened it.

April’s clothes lay in a pile beside the bath, a forgotten book on top of them, and she lay utterly still in the darkness, most of her body under the water, her eyes closed. Her hair was dry on the top and wet past her ears, wet tendrils sticking under her cheekbones and along her lips. She was pale and beautiful and so still that for a moment, just a second or two, he worried she was dead.

Her eyes opened then, lashes wet with bathwater. “What are you doing?” she asked. Her voice was toneless; it had been for most of the day.

“Gotta pee,” he told her, stepping over her things and lifting the lid on the toilet. “Okay?”

“Sure.”

He flushed and washed his hands and then turned to the door before hesitating. He could see her hand moving under the water, one fingertip drawing a line up along her thigh and over the curve of her hip. He watched and she traced the line again and again.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

She looked up at him. “Hmm?”

He knelt and then dipped his hand in the water, which was silky with those oils she used. He hated those oils. The water burned but it always did with her.

Sam caught her hand, pressing it there against her hip. “There?”

“Oh.” She blinked and looked startled and then shrugged, sending little waves crashing against the side of the bathtub and then ricochet back against her skin. “I was thinking,” she said. She swallowed and her lips turned in a little at the corners, apologetic.

“You need to stop thinking,” he told her.

“I was thinking,” she said again, pulling her hand away and retracing the line. “That if I cut in here, along this line, all the fat would spill out. I mean, I know it wouldn’t. But I was just imagining.” 

“Jesus,” he said, because he didn’t know what else to say. “C’mon, April. Don’t do that.”

“I’m not doing anything,” she said, drawing away a little. “I’m only thinking.”

He ran the palm of his hand down along her hip and her thigh, catching her hand again. “You need to stop thinking,” he repeated, and she looked up at him, eyes wide and helpless.

“I can’t,” she confessed, voice shaking just a little. “That’s all I’ve got.”

“That’s not everything,” he argued, and then he drew his hand up again, dragging hers with it, along her hip, then brushing in along her waist and higher, to the bottom of her ribcage, where he spread his fingers out, chasing her heartbeat. He couldn’t feel it, so he leaned forward and kissed her neck, feeling her pulse against his bottom lip.

“Sam,” April said, quiet. He couldn’t read her tone, but her head tipped back, so he kissed up along the line of her jaw and then kissed her mouth.

Water sloshed up along his arm, soaking into the sleeve of his shirt and splashing against his chest, but Sam didn’t care. For a moment, April was with him. She kissed him back, just a little but it was enough, it was proof that she was there and that she loved him and that she knew he was there and that maybe that was enough for her, for now.

He traced his hand along her ribs to her other side, and then down, over her stomach and back to her hip, curling there and holding on, because sometimes Sam didn’t know how to make her stay, how to keep her here with him instead of in her own mind. Sometimes he thought if he just held her tight enough, she would stay.

Sometimes he forgot the more tightly he tried to hold her, the faster she’d run.

“Please,” she said, and her hand pressed to his against her hip, fingers curling around his. 

He squeezed his eyes shut and prayed for her to finish that with “please kiss me again” or “please touch me here” or “please touch me like this” or just “please, please, please I love you.”

“You know -- you know I don’t like it when --” she said, but her breath was catching and breaking and he pulled away like she burned.

“Sorry,” he said. “Jesus.”

“No, Sam, no.” She caught his hand as he tried to pull away, splashing more water over the side of the bath, wetting his knees and her clothes. The cover of her book was starting to curl from the steam and the water.

“I’m sorry,” she said, but she was crying. “It’s just, you know, I can’t -- it makes me want to puke, Sam. I’m too -- I’m too disgusting, and I can’t let you -- I can’t.”

There was nothing to say and he pulled away, gently letting her go. She pulled her knees up, sending more water to the floor, and buried her face in her hands. She was shaking all over and he thought, for one second, that maybe he could try again, could touch her back and her shoulders and soothe that away.

He didn’t bother to try, just stood up and walked away, closing the door quietly behind him.

*

Sam was trying to sleep. He’d been trying for quite some time, and it really ought to be easier for a man as tired as he was, but all he seemed able to do was lie very still and watch the lights move on the ceiling whenever cars drove by.

Time moved strangely on nights like these and it could have been years before the door inched open and April came in, wrapped in her ridiculous robe and clutching that stupid book in her hands. 

Her hair was still falling in ratty, wet tangles in her face and she looked like a frightened child or a mouse, hovering in the doorway and unsure of her welcome.

Sam wondered if he should pretend to be sleeping, and he wondered if she’d stay if he did. He wondered if she wanted him to sleep on the couch and he wondered if he should offer, or just grab a pillow and go. He wondered if she’d say yes if he brought up the dog, and wondered if maybe she was hungry now. He wondered if he was hungry now and decided he wasn’t.

She still stood there, uncertain, in the doorway.

“Sam?” she asked finally, barely a whisper.

He closed his eyes and pretended he was sleeping.

It took a few moments before she hesitantly slipped under the covers, and he pretended he couldn’t hear her crying, since she was trying so hard to do it silently.

When she turned onto her side facing him and touched his shoulder with her fingertips, however, he held his breath. And when she said, “I’m sorry,” he turned to face her and gave up all pretense of sleep.

“Tomorrow I’ll be better,” she promised, and he crushed her against his chest and curled up around her and still kept pretending he didn’t hear her crying.

“Love you,” he told her. “Love you, love you, love you.” 

Sometimes he thought if he said it a thousand times, maybe she’d hear it once or twice.

She fell asleep against his chest and he kept stroking her hair until the damp strands were dry and curling around his fingertips. The lights kept moving across the ceiling and she kept breathing, so he did as well.

A dog, he thought, as he fell asleep. They definitely needed a dog.


End file.
